Six Suites by Somebody-or-Other

Well, here’s today’s question: was it Bach or Mrs. Bach who wrote the suites for solo cello—those suites that Casals championed, and about which he said, “they are the very essence of Bach, and Bach is the essence of music?”

Hunh?

Look, I’ve played them for about four decades, and I’ve gone through several feelings about them. Written sometime around 1720, when Bach had finally found a job that didn’t require cranking out a religious cantata every week—his archduke or prince or elector or whoever being of some protestant sect that disapproved of music—the six suites follow a basic pattern: a prelude followed by four or five dance movements.

OK—so that’s a pattern that Bach followed in the partitas for solo violin. So why should anyone think that it was the second wife of Johann Sebastian Bach who had written the cello suites? Because that’s what Martin Jarvis, a Welshman teaching in Australia, is claiming.

His first assertion I agree with: there’s something not quite right about the suites. Here’s how The New Yorker puts it, “He reports that when he was studying the works in his youth he had the nagging sense that they differed from other music by Bach.” And what’s the difference?

Well, to me, the cello suites are a lot less interesting, less complicated, less sophisticated than the solo violin works. Want a comparison? Check out the two sarabandes below—one for violin, the other for cello. And it may be that the—for me—excessively slow tempo of the cello sarabande dooms it to sound plain and unimpressive, but I think there’s something else. If J. S. Bach did write the piece, he wasn’t having his best day.

And I know—that damn Prelude to the G Major suite makes it onto a lot of “top ten classical music” lists, but to me? It’s a snore, which is why I spent years paying it at a breakneck pace, and trying to emphasize the essential chordal nature of the piece. Why? Because there’s absolutely nothing else going on….

As you can see in the third clip, Jarvis isn’t afraid of suggesting some rather dark stuff about Papa Bach. His first wife—did she commit suicide because Bach was fooling around with Anna Magdalena, who would become his second wife, and the presumed composer of the cello suites? And why was Bach ordered to get married, but refused a church wedding? Oh, and then why did the two children of wife number one burn the love letters and day books of Bach and Anna Magdalena?

Beyond all of this, is there any serious evidence that Anna Magdalena, not Johann Sebastian, wrote the cello suites? Well, the only manuscript we have is one written by Anna Magdalena, and the traditional belief is that she was merely a copyist. We do have, however, the violin partitas in J. S. Bach’s hand. And then we have “forensic” evidence: here’s the Independent on the subject:

Forensic analysis of her manuscript handwriting shows that it did not have the “slowness or heaviness” usually attributed to someone who is simply copying but the quick, uncertain hand of a creator.

Numerous corrections to scores written in her hand, signal that she had been composing the works all along.

In the Independent, the cellist Julian Lloyd Weber makes a good point—Anna Magdalena, who was a singer but not, apparently, trained as a string player—had her hands full. From the same source:

Anna Magdalena ran a busy and stressful household. She was pregnant every year from 1723 to 1737, bearing 13 children, seven of whom died in youth. The couple also raised the surviving children from Bach’s first marriage.

In fact, people were quite a bit less fussy about attribution in the baroque era, when Bach, for example, borrowed from Vivaldi and other composers. And however much I love Bist du bei Mir, which everybody thinks is by Bach, I know that it was really written by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. So? It’s still a beautiful piece….

Will we ever know if Anna Magdalena, and not Johann Sebastian, Bach wrote the cello suites? Probably not. But it is true that there are very few female composers, which started me to thinking: Who was the first female composer? Well, I figured it would be Hildegard of Bingen, in the 12^th century, but guess what? There’s the little case of Sappho, born six hundred years before Christ.

Lastly, it has to be said that I am as guilty of sexism as all the rest. I play the suites virtually every day, since it’s what cellists do. I’ve made my piece with them: I neither think they are masterworks nor rubbish. My beef, mostly, is that for them to be effective, we have to give up, give in, and recognize that baroque performance practice has a lot—if not everything—to help us put them across. But how have I been sexist?

By assuming that the suites are lesser music than the other music Bach wrote, and therefore have to be by his wife. No one, by the way, has suggested the opposite—that all of the manuscripts we have in Bach’s hand are simply copies of Anna Magdalena’s work. And however much the idea that Mrs. Bach was a composer, the idea that Mr. Bach was the copyist?

Revolutionary!